A CHRONICLE SPECIAL REPORT

The Tank:

Meet Raunda Lindsey

Raunda Lindsey, a recovery coach with the Harris County Sheriff's Office, cries while listening to an inmate talk about his life experience.

At her desk at the Harris County Sheriff's Office, recovery coach Raunda Lindsey can't make it through a 10-minute conversation without having to check her phone. It buzzes and beeps at a cartoonish frequency: her husband; her youngest daughter; the former prostitutes she's coaching.

Her office, on the county jail's sixth floor, is wallpapered with drawings from inmates. One, a gritty and intricate pen-and-ink sketch, shows a man driving a motorcycle through the intersection of Faith and Grace streets, skirting past a stop sign marked Sin as a prostitute smokes in the background.

"He's so talented, isn't he?" Lindsey asks, proud. To Lindsey, the artist is just that: an artist. Not a criminal. She looks past Sin; she sees Hope and Grace.

And she knows, first-hand, that it's possible to get there. She spent most of her own 20s and 30s bouncing in and out of jail. But as of May, she's been drug-free for 18 years. And it's been 16 years since she last worked as a prostitute.

"All they need is someone to care," she says, setting the phone back on her cluttered desk. "And since I've been down that road, it's easy for me not to give up."

Don't give up

Sometimes those years on the street feel fresh, like shadows barely over her shoulder.

Once, during a binge, she crashed in a doorless closet in a building under construction. The next morning, construction workers woke her. There was cement everywhere, she says, her voice light with astonishment: "They thought I was dead."

She found her way to a women's shelter, cycled through prison one last time, and came out clean – from drugs, anyway. But she couldn't find anyone willing to hire someone with a past as shaky as hers. So for two more years, she continued working as a prostitute.

"Usually when I would prostitute, I was high," she remembers. "And this I was doing sober. Oh God, it was horrible. And I'd convince myself it was OK because I needed the money to pay this bill, or that bill. 'I need this money.' So I would put whatever I was feeling on the back burner. Just on the back burner."

Then one day she was attacked.

"I could have lost my life," she says. "He dislocated my shoulder, and it wasn't even for that much money. And I was like. 'Why am I still doing this when I could go do something much different?"

To ease that trauma, she came close to using drugs. Instead she called her sponsor.

Eighteen years ago, Lindsey was in jail for prostitution, now she’s an example for how someone can turn her life around. She knows what the women of Tank 6M1B are up against, and promises not to give up on them.

Emotions

One day, in Tank 6M1B, the lesson is about dealing with emotions. Lindsey talks about her own struggle: "When I'd sober up, I didn't like being sober, because of the realness. My emotions. I'd start thinking about the things I'd destroyed. People that I missed and missed me."

"And what happens?" she asks, clapping the ornate fan she often carries. "That doesn't last very long, and I'm right back out on the block so I could cover up those feelings."

The inmates call out the emotions they felt before their arrests.

"Shy."

"Hopeless."

"Depression."

"Hostile."

"Insecure. Stupid. Resentful."

"Isolated."

"Lovestruck."

"Terrified."

"Withdrawn."

"Isn't it something, how we thought we were here because of the crime we committed, and we're really here because of our emotions?" Lindsey says. "So your assignment is to develop your personal coping skills so you can deal with these emotions without lashing out."

Imagine, she says: You're working at a new job at Kroger's. Going above and beyond. Yet your manager keeps picking on you.

You have two options, she says: You can lash out; or you can find a creative way to deal with your anger.

"You don't want to feel that you did have a job, you was doing good. You're at Kroger's one day, and because you don't process your emotions, you're on your knees in a crack house the next day. Yes. That's very real. So we have to change the way we deal with our emotions," she says.

She urges them to write in their journals; keeping one has helped her. Some entries, from her own jail days, are short: "I don't know why I have to do this," and "This is stupid." A couple months later, she wrote about the struggle to stay clean.

Now, she tells the inmates, she flips through the pages when she needs a reminder of how far she's come. "If I get into a space – which is very, very rare, but it happens – to where I feel down and depressed and worthless, where the enemy is trying to get in, I pick that up. And every time I open it up, I have to laugh at myself, tell myself, 'You're not going back.' And neither are you."

The inmates go silent. There's reverence in the way they look at her. Sure, she's a suit. But there's still a little jumpsuit in her.

"It makes me feel like I can do this too," inmate Desirae Lange says one day. "I mean, she did it. She was just like me. But she did it."

Maggie Gordon is a Houston Chronicle features reporter. She can be reached by e-mail at Maggie.Gordon@chron.com or by Twitter: @MagEGordon